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“‘What d’ye want?’ the skipper says, when he got within hail.

“‘Some sail-needles and a ball o’ twine,’ I hollered back; ‘we got everything else.’ You should just a-heard him cuss–” and one of Captain Bob’s laughs rang through the room. “Them’s two things I’d forgot–didn’t think o’ them in fact till the mainsheet give ‘way.

“Well, he chucked ’em aboard with another cuss. I hadn’t no money to pay no salvage. All we wanted was them needles and a little elbow-grease and gumption. So we started in, and ‘fore night, she still a-thrashin’, I’d fixed up the sails, patched the eyelets with a pair o’ boot-legs, and was off again.”

“What were you doing off Hatteras, Captain Bob?” I asked. I was leading him on, professing ignorance of minor details, so that I could again enjoy the delight of hearing him tell it.

“Oh, that was another one o’ them crazy jobs I used to take when I didn’t know no better. Why, I guess you remember ’bout that wreckin’ job off Hamilton, Bermuda?”

He was settled in his chair now, his legs crossed, his head down between his shoulders.

“You see, after I quit work on the ‘ledge,’ I was put to ‘t for a job, and there come along a feller by the name of Lamson–the agent of an insurance company, who wanted me to go to Bermuda and git up some forty-two pieces o’ white I-talian marble that had been wrecked three years before off the harbor of Hamilton. They ran from three to twenty-one tons each, he said. So off I started with the Screamer. He didn’t say, though, that the wreck lay on a coral reef eight miles from land, or I’d stayed to home in New Bedford.

“When I got to where the wreck lay you couldn’t see a thing ‘bove water. So I got into an old divin’ dress we had aboard–one we used on the Ledge–oiled up the pump and went down to look her over, and by Jimmy Criminy, not a scrap o’ that wreck was left ‘cept the rusty iron work and that part o’ the bottom plankin’ of the vessel that lay under the stones! Everything else was eaten up with the worms! Funniest-lookin’ place you ever see. The water was just as clear as air, and I could see every one o’ them stone plain as daylight–looked like so many big lumps o’ white sugar scattered ’round–and they were big! One of ’em weighed twenty-one tons, and none on ’em weighed less’n five. Of course I knew how big they were ‘fore I started, and I’d fitted up the Screamer special to h’ist ’em, but I didn’t know I’d have to handle ’em twice; once from where they laid on that coral reef in twenty-eight feet o’ water and then unload ’em on the Navy Yard dock, above Hamilton, and then pick ’em up agin, load ’em ‘board the Screamer, and unload ’em once more ‘board a Boston brig they’d sent down for ’em–one o’ them high-waisted things ’bout sixteen feet from the water-line to the rail. That was the wust part of it.”

Captain Bob stopped, felt in his pocket for a match, found it empty, rose from his chair, picked one from a match-safe on my desk, lighted his cigar, and resumed his seat again. I have found it wisest to let him have his own way in times like these. If I interrupt the flow of his talk it may stop for the day, and I lose the best part of the enjoyment of having him with me.

“Pretty decent chaps, them Englishmen”–puff-puff–the volume of smoke was all right once more. “One Monday morning I ran out of the Navy Yard dock within sight of the wreck. I had been layin’ up over Sunday to get out of the way of a norther, when I luffed a little too soon, and bang went my bowsprit and scraped off about three feet of red paint from the end of the dock. One of the watchmen was on the string-piece, and saw the whole thing. ‘Come ashore,’ he says, ‘and go and see the Admiral; you can’t scrape no paint off this dock with my permission.’